The Sound of a Photograph

View of Sharingtons Tower at Lacock Abbey--Henry Fox Talbot

Here is a photo that evokes a loud scraping sound. What kind of force could gouge so deeply into a piece of granite? Or was it the cumulative effect of softer sounds over time?

Our sonic Umwelt is so tiny--not only by the range of hearing--but by the world itself. We only hear a limited range of imaginable sounds that occur in the world, and yet there are sounds happening everywhere simultaneously which is beyond sensory thresholds.

Ludwig Wittgenstein once said, "If a lion could talk, we could not understand him." Modes of communication in other sentient beings are unique and are outside our comprehension. Technologies like cameras and sound recording devices bridge the gap but may never completely close it. That's where imagination comes in.

Perhaps perception is made more complete through a silent spir­ituality: To be without a body is to be in our natural state, "hearing" everything without having to perceive it.

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Several years ago, I went to an exhibition of old Polaroids. They were placed in grids on the wall, and displayed in a reverse position showing only the captions handwritten on the backs of the photographs. There were also series of photographs that had lots of marginalia on them, requiring close inspection. It was a way of "exposing" a photograph with descriptive text only. This gave me the idea that one could actually stage a photo exhibition with just captions, perhaps with just blank white spaces, framed and matted. I am creating a variation on this idea on my latest album in the Music for Places series, Music For Photographs ("MFPV"), by composing music that suggests iconic (or just well-known) photographs. Essentially it is a scoring for stills, as Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills were contextualized by suggesting they were captured from pre-existing footage from films or TV. Like a film score, they are a 'still score'.

I once listened to an interview with artist and photographer Ed Ruscha by the late Peter Jennings where he said he thought the photographs of Walker Evans had an 'audio' to them. MFPV is an extension of this idea but uses through-composed music and even pop songs, not just field recording.  (Also see/hear my Audio Snapshots).

The effect is interestingly like the Talbot photograph above from the mid nineteenth century. If I were to create a piece of music for it I'd make it sound like it looks. In an abstract sense, it perhaps informed the idea of ambient music more than a century before it became a thing.

In the piece Saigon Street 1963, I am referencing an event that happened there in that year. I am also alluding to other iconic photos from the Vietnam War which you can see in your mind's eye. Another piece has the title Standard Amarillo which also points to a specific photograph taken in that city in the 1960s.

What makes an iconic photo or sound?

What makes a photo iconic is largely determined by a generation, or the passage of 20-30 years. For example, the Cartier-Bresson photo of the kissing couple is iconic because it has semiotic value with the end of World War II. But there were also jubilant kissing couples after every war, and photographers took pictures of them, but they are 'fungible' (the word of the year). Accordingly, older people don't always have all the context for iconic photos of the now. (Without searching 'Naked Athena' do you know that photo and the circumstances?)

[It's remarkable that search engines also now define what is iconic by popularity and rankings, which is more evidence that our lives are lived by the numbers. Apparently Cartier-Bresson took lots of photos of people kissing--probably because he coached them. Also, if you search "Paris kissing" the results will include Cartier-Bresson and well as Brassai and others). Paris is the quintessential location for the part of the story or film where the relationship is new and going well, that goes south at some point. In terms of the film scoring, you know the clichés).

Why is this iconic? It's marketed as such.

 https://iconicimagesstore.net/product/creedence-clearwater-revival-by-ed-caraeff-vintage-print/ 

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The iconization of photos has changed. What's happening now is that whenever there's some kind of an event, almost everybody (as well as surveillance cameras) is taking pictures of it. In 1946, not many people carried cameras around with them--and those that did were taking photography more seriously as an art form because it was something that was perhaps more revered then, or was a more rigorous endeavor. But I wonder if anybody is taking photography seriously to the extent that it was in the 1940s, or that "serious" has been redefined in some way. What we are serious about now is the virality of the image, and to take credit for it if we can. But that is almost impossible now just from the sheer fungibility of images.

One of the photographers that I wanted to feature on the album was Brassai, but I couldn't decide which photograph was iconic, as I feel that almost all his work is iconic in some way. I wouldn't want to misuse the word "iconic" as simply meaning that it is original--which is what I'm interested in. And I think his work certainly was--especially his low-light evening photographs, and the use of fog as a mood. But even in situations where fog may be present, it's now easy for anyone to just walk outside and take fog photographs (sans tripod) with a smartphone and share beautiful images. But they are just fungible imitations, because everybody has already seen them, and have perhaps taken them. What makes work original is how things which are already cliché are differentiated by things on the periphery--in my case, the use of sound. We also get a sense of place with Brassai. (Incidentally, Brassai is a pseudonym derived from Brassó, the Hungarian village where he was born). 

[An example of a misappropriation of iconic imagery is this recent "send-up' of the Abbey Road album cover, What the hell's an NFT? When I first saw it I was expecting it to "wink", meaning the SNL cast members were in specific roles suggesting the Beatles, left-to-right, George Harrison, Paul McCartney, Ringo, and John Lennon. Kate McKinnon looks like she might be Warhol as George Harrison, but why? And what are the other characterizations? I also see it as a missed opportunity to be clever. I mean, if you're going to create a clever parody, why not do a little bit of research? Perhaps they did and it's not being shared]. 

Embodied Viewing

The way we used to look at photographs was in a physical space, printed on paper, matted, and framed.  Looking at photographs was an "embodied" viewing of photographs in a physical space. Now there is no space around photographs, and the sound gives it a space, as does the stereo field which we have grandfathered in as an idea of putting recorded music in a space, even though it is only in a flattened space. Surround-sound, and even binaural recording extends stereo but it is still a flat plane.

Sound, or even other senses give us access to the memories of photographs.